Wednesday, 29 August 2007

Geoffs Genealogy Update 29 August 2007

I've spent quite a bit of time this week looking at the Blagg family of Cheadle, Staffordshire. Although they were (are) not Bankes descendants in the strict sense, one of their number married Arthur Ackland Hunt in 1879, and therefore the family feature on the pedigree. I had carried out some research into the Blaggs some time ago, and my interest in them has now been stirred again by the new contact I referred to last week, who is descended from Arthur Ackland Hunt.

The Blaggs were very prosperous people. They lived in Cheadle for most of the nineteenth century, and appear to have links to the Nottinghamshire Blaggs, who lived in the Mansfield area. Among the items I have managed to obtain are:

Transcriptive summaries of a number of legal documents relating to these people,

Census entries

Gravestone inscriptions

Biographical notes relating to a family member who was particularly well known.

A photograph of a sampler made by a family member in the nineteenth century

A photograph of the family home in Cheadle - sadly since demolished.

All this without leaving my keyboard. Amazing! You can see why I missed my internet access so much when it was denied to me for a few weeks.

The internet is a truly remarkable means to family history research, and we should all feel very grateful that we live in the internet age. It is important, however, that we treat the information we obtain with a degree of circumspection. The material I describe above comes from what I would consider to be reliable websites - Ancestry.co.uk, Nottingham University etc. I therefore feel pretty confident that it is accurate. However, not all websites are that reliable in terms of the quality of the information they display, so we shouldn't view them uncritically. This applies equally to my site - www.geoffsgenealogy.co.uk . Although I try to be as accurate as I can in compiling the information that goes online I am as prone to error as the next person! If you spot any errors on the website I'd be grateful if you would let me know.

Further excitement this week - I've been contacted by a lady who visited the website and is descended from our common ancestors Thomas Archer and Hannah Bide, who married in London in 1794. She is therefore my cousin, and I'm very glad to hear from her. I look forward to exchanging information with her and furthering our research. I'm sure that we shall be able to help one another very much.